Forum Solution in Ruby or Python

Question

I need to find a suitable forum in Ruby or Python for my company's web site. I've been given the following general criteria:

1. Data Migration: How do they store the data? Preferably in database not flat files.
2. User Management: Need to be able to do single login via our own current LDAP
3. Email Integration: -- Daily Digest Checkbox, etc. -- RSS Feeds
4. Language: Ruby/Rails or Python (our current single sign on LDAP is in Python)
5. Easy to skin (CSS, etc.)
6. Not phpbb (management's decision)

Any suggestions, stories from the trenches, etc.?

Answer 1

This was answered a while ago in ServerFault's sister site: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/375551/forum-software-written-in-python

Should digging through SourceForge as suggested there not be your cup of tea, perhaps the following list of Django-based forums might be of interest:

http://sct.sphene.net/wiki/show/Board/

http://code.google.com/p/snapboard/

http://code.google.com/p/django-forum/

Disclaimer: I have no personal experience with any of these applications, but I'd imagine once you got past the learning curve of Django itself, not only would you solve the forum requirement, but you'd also have a robust and extensible python framework in place to grow according to future requirements.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I'd go with a simple forum package like Beast; it won't necessarily do everything you need out of the box, but it's Rails-based and pretty easy to tweak to suit your custom requirements.